that was that
by Ginger Muffins
Summary: Sequel to "This is It." Character deaths, language. Second person POV. You're in trouble, Vert. You've been in trouble for a while.


You screwed up, Vert.

No, that's an understatement. You fucked up big time. Your dad said some stuff about fixing the world, making it better for everyone, and you listened, even though last time he talked about fixing the world you ended up at a Christian summer camp listening to a man with bleach white teeth talk about values and what makes a man and purity and gently implying the homophobia and the racism and the supremacy and the jingoism.

The world he paints when you talk to him, fresh off winning against Gelorum and loaded up with Alien tech and still woozy from the victory and the drugs they used to knock you out, seems perfect. No war, no blood, everyone equal, everyone free, perfectly fair elections, perfectly free media. So you give him the tech, help him unlock it, help him understand it (because you were always good at engines and figuring out how to make stuff work, even if your grades didn't always reflect that.)

And it's worse this time, because he wants to fix the entire world in the same way. People are buying into it, for now, that New World order propaganda, the kind your face is promoting, but you read stuff about the physical augmentations and the torture camps and the purifying and the gender traitors and midnight executions and you know it's wrong

You're in trouble, Chief of Staff Joseph Wheeler.

When your mom died, you were 13, about to turn 14, and nobody could reach your dad. You spent the week with Alec's family as nobody in your extended family was able to get over their extended grudges to help their kid nephew, grandson, their cousin. So Alec's mom helped with the funeral arrangements and Alec's dad made your favourite meals and Alec's sister spent a lot of time screaming down phones trying to contact your dad and you, Vert, clung on to Alec, still in shock, still having nightmares about finding your mom's body on the floor, being stuck their while the crime scene investigators showed up, answering the same questions over and over again. A botched burglary, they said. You don't say anything.

You are one of the Silencerz best assets, and you requested some leave, but there's a meeting before that, just one hour—if you can get through one hour of listening to your dad talk without giving away your doubts, you can get away to the nearest embassy and fax the documents you have stuck in your breast pocket to every human rights group on the planet. They'd be interested to know that the regime (your father's regime) has been holding the human rights workers hostage for the last 6 months, faking every phone call, every email, making it seem like the USA is more free and progressive than every. If you can get through this meeting, Vert, you're going to be okay.

You glance up and down the line—mostly other Highway 35ers, Alec, Banjee, and Dan. Alec shoots you a shit-eating grin and sticks his tongue out at you. You roll your eyes back, not feeling the banter.

The meeting is long and boring and you have to stop yourself from drumming your fingers or biting your pen or tapping your feet because you don't want to look nervous. You've survived two weeks in the building with the deadly knowledge strapped to your chest, and you can use that to calm yourself down and keep your breathing low as you finish talking about the pockets of resistance. Then your father asks his assets—his generals—you, Alec, Banjee, Dan, and two others who you don't really know, to walk into the courtyard with him.

You're in trouble, Vert.

The courtyard is filled with highway 35ers and their family members. Each are on their knees, hands tied behind their backs, even the kids, even the grandparents. Esmeralda Sanchez is at the front, and so is Alec's whole family and Dan's fiancée and their kid. Aside from the Teku and the Metal Maniacs and Lani, everyone you've ever been friends with is kneeling in front of you, beaten and bruised. On the edges of the courtyard there are men with guns. Some of the guns are pointed at you.

"You may be wondering," your father says, striding in front of his generals, pacing from one to the next, "Why I've gathered you all here today." He pauses, in front of you, and you know he knows, you know you should have gotten out earlier and taken the others with you, but it's already decades too late for that. He leans forward, unbuttons your coat, and you don't make a move to stop him because it's already too late. He pulls out the papers, "Spying, son? Loyalty to idealism can be a good thing, but I do get nervous when you're loyal to anything but me." He stands back, "When any of you are loyal to something that isn't me."

You're in monumental trouble, Major General Vert Wheeler.

Banjee makes a choking noise and Dan breathes in sharply and one of the other generals has a hushed whisper of "You couldn't—you wouldn't" and the other one splutters but Alec knows your dad just as much as you do and you both know he could and he would and he's going to. He signals his men, and they move in on the crowd of everybody any of you have ever loved. When one of the unnamed generals tries to look away he breaks a finger, and at the end the only people with no broken fingers are Banjee, too shocked and appalled to look away, and you, Vert.

And the riflemen get to the front line and mechanically shoot away and suddenly Dan is screaming and tearing at the men holding him back and Banjee is collapsed over himself and Alec is moaning like he's been hit by a truck and you can only watch, your throat too dry to make sound and your limbs too brittle and your muscles too weak.

When it's done you're dragged away to a cell and you can feel the blame and guilt settle in around you like a choking cowl.

You come home sophomore year with a 4.3 GPA, a skateboarding title, and more than 10 hours a week logged for community services. Your dad barely looks at it before denouncing it as barely good enough, how could you be so undisciplined, do you want to go to military school. So you pick fights with every jock who calls you a fag (considering you're blonde and skinny and limpet onto Alec there are a few of them) and you let your GPA plummet and spend all your time on the sand or in the sea. Your dad calls your next report card unacceptable and you curse him out, tell him that it shouldn't fucking matter because all you're going to end up as is a soldier anyway, you don't get to make those decisions anyway. You end up grounded every other week.

You start intentionally learning the opposite of what your dad wants you to learn. He wants you to have better math grades so you spend all your time in metal shop welding artsy bullshit. He wants you to learn Hemingway so you read nothing but Angelou; he wants you to body build in gym so you surf and put together the schools first sex ed skit troupe.

You're usually in trouble, Vert.

You don't recognize Banjee or Alec next time you see them. They're hollow eyed and they throw food in the cell you're stuck in and hit you when you try to talk to them.

Bio-engineering. Acceleron tech. You did that to them.

You're in trouble, Wheeler.

You hear Dan died on the table, he was resisting, and it kills you if you resist, and you resolve to keep resisting, you stop eating, you don't react to anything they do to you, don't react to the impassive faces of Banjee and Alec with blood on their hands, someone else's blood, your blood. You give Alec your best shit-eating grin, and he beats the shit out of you. It makes you feel better, somehow.

Alec's one of their best soldiers, they say. Best kill record. Took out over 100 rebels, and is always raring for more. Always follows orders.

You think back on the first time you skipped school, when you were young and dumb and would follow Alec everywhere, so you skipped school to go to a peace rally. Alec thought it was hilarious, the General's son at the peace rally with a heart painted badly on one cheek. You were there half because of Alec and half to stick it to your dad, but Alec was there because he believed it. Alec grins. Alec is a pacifist.

Alec gets shot in the spine out on a mission and because they need your, because you're the face, because he isn't useful anymore, they torture him to death and make you watch. They attach electrodes to the part of his brain in charge of pain and keep turning the intensity up and up and up. And that's what breaks you, Vert. You weren't that hard to figure out.

The wire mesh in your brain means you can't disobey. You hate that. You hate that it doesn't reduce you to a robot like it did the others. Alec was robotic like the other two, Banjee was babbling beyond his own control, completely lost; all of them were made distant, allowed to disconnect. You aren't given that option. You remember everything you do in the kind of HD precision that is surreal and overwhelming.

You can't disconnect—instead, you become the best soldier, best officer, best politician. You can see the holes in every plan put in front of you, you know the weak points, and on your dad's orders you give them out. He tells you big plans, and you break it down into little steps and enact those steps. He's retreating into a mechanical place, and all he wants is control—of the entire world, if he can get it.

Execute the prisoners. Close camp Beta-A. Assassinate rebel leader x. Torture informant y. Shoot. Kill.

You shoot Markie. He doesn't die quickly, so you end him with your hands. Save resources. One of the directives in your head means that you strangle a bleeding friend to death. And you can't live like this, you can't you can't you can't. You shoot Kurt, you shoot Taro, your memories aren't in order, you kill Monkey as he crawls from the wreckage, you can't you can't

You take up cigarettes and trying to outsmart your own brain.

"Alec?"

"Yeah?"

You're 18, heroes, good lads, saved the world, he's a surf champ, you're with the Teku, and you need to say it.

You can't.

Fuck.

"Call me, alright?"

Of course he knew, you idiot.

Your first move is carefully planting your keys in your old house. Your second is watching Karma Eiss die. Your third is registering Nolo as dead as well. Your fourth is waiting.

Banjee died as himself. The rebels left him bleeding and babbling about the voices in his head. Your father commands you to finish him and you do, because you can't help yourself.

Nolo breaks into the HQ, but you've sent the other soldiers away to other high priority targets because there was no way you'd know when it would happen. Through a pretty loose interpretation of your order to protect the country, you don't shoot Nolo. He looks terrible—ragged clothes, sleepless eyes, the remains of disease sores and matted hair. You wonder how you look in his eyes.

"Do you remember in high school, you learn about the Nazis, and how after the Holocaust they'd say stuff like 'I did my duty as a soldier, I didn't know what I was doing'?" you ask conversationally, drawing on a cigarette. Nolo glares at you unsteadily, hand on his weapon, ready to destroy you with a twitch. You look forward to it. _You blo_w the smoke out between his lips, and continued, "Well, that's all a lie. Even when you have control, you know what you're doing, you have a choice. Did Tesla tell you about the organic technology? We stole it from the drones. You can control peoples thoughts, peoples actions- But you have to break their will first." You laugh. That makes him angrier.

"I think I know what you're saying," He's nervous, hand on his gun in his pocket, eyes flicking to you to the camera to the cigarette. He hates you, he pities you. If you keep talking he'll kill you, and won't that be nice.

"I thought this was a good idea at first, the whole 'new world order ' thing." You were an idiot. "That's why I let him take Acceleron technologies," Idiot, "and that's why I helped him." Idiot, "Dad." Bastard, "But I found out—I found out what he was doing with that technology, that gear, not long after. I saw what he was doing to the other racers. What he planned to do to me. I tried to escape, you know, I knew he was evil, and I wanted out. I was so scared. He'd taken me aside, just after I'd saved you guys, and said we needed to talk. I shouldn't of listened. He got into my head, like he eventually did with everyone else. You see, with this technology, you've got to resist, resist, resist, or you die or get assimilated. And I resisted, Nolo. I resisted for so long. I watched our friends die, and I still resisted.

"But then…" Here you lose some control, but it's taking every inch of willpower you have to keep Nolo alive, to explain. Your shoulders slumped furth, and you have to look away or you could kill him, "Then they killed Alec. They killed him in… a slow, dreadful way, and I just… just couldn't resist anymore. I couldn't think about resisting. I just let him get in my head. I did such terrible things. I should have been stronger, should have stopped this, but I couldn't. Alec died. Everyone died. It was slow, and I was weak." The memory hurts. The thought hurts. "Dad hooked himself up to the computers, right in the middle, where he can see everything. But he can't see you. You're a ghost. It's ironic, the technology he thought would let him live forever is going to kill him." You pause, stubbing out the cigarette, and resume eye contact. "You are going to kill him, right?"

Nolo was quiet, the only sound being the cocking of a chamber.

"But you have to kill me first." Thank god.

Nolo looks angry again, but hurt as well, "This was a set-up, wasn't it. You left me to find those keys, and made sure that I'd be registered as dead along with Karma. You brought me here… to kill your dad. And you."

"Yeah. I'm sorry, but I can't do any of it myself. I couldn't even stop myself from killing Kurt. I couldn't stop myself from doing any of this. I'm a monster, and I need to die." He stares at you, and you shrug. "I'm putrid, and rotten, and not worth saving. Sorry. It's all up to you now."

It's a sunny day, and you're exhausted. There's sand in your hair, eyes, wetsuit. You rode out waves all morning into the afternoon, and you definitely did better than Alec did. No matter what he says. Then you swam, dove deep under the water, staying below until you get tunnel vision and you can't think, and you break the surface with mussels and clams and shells and Alec's laughter as he teases you for being more frog than man. He pulls you out of the water, both of you laughing, and you leave your boards half buried on the sand as you collapse on the rug and the towels in the hot sun and you drink warm lemonade and chips laced with sand and dry ham sandwiches which taste better than anything else you've ever eaten.

"Hey, Alec," you say, drunk on sunshine, "How long can we stay here?"

Alec laughs, "I dunno, how does forever sound?"

You're warm and happy and full and there doesn't seem to be anything better in the world, so you close your eyes and stretch.

"Sounds perfect."


End file.
